Gangster's ex-girlfriend shows no shame as she describes how she helped clean bullets after B.C. massacre

At last, it had dawned on her. These were thugs she’d been dealing with, not “family,” as she once imagined. So she turned on them. There wasn’t much choice; it was either talk, or face going to jail. In April 2009, 16 months after her boyfriend and several other members of the Red Scorpion gang allegedly shot to death six men in a Surrey, B.C., apartment tower, the woman spoke to police. Reluctantly, at first.

They kinda screwed me over

“I was getting over the fact that I didn’t have to be loyal to my family anymore, because they weren’t so loyal to me,” the woman recalled Friday in B.C. Supreme Court, at the trial of her former partner, Cody Haevischer, and his alleged associate, Matthew Johnston, both of whom are accused of committing the six Surrey murders, execution style. “They kinda screwed me over.”

The woman can’t be named, thanks to a court-imposed publication ban that forbids media from identifying her. Only her initials are fair game. K.M. is now a key witness in the so-called Surrey Six trial. Years in the making, the trial opened in October after some unexpected — and deplorable — twists along the way.

The Crown posits that just prior to the October 2007 massacre in Surrey, the Red Scorpions attempted to extort $100,000 from a rival drug dealer, one Corey Lal. When he refused to pay up, the Red Scorpions schemed to kill him. It is alleged that in the course of committing Lal’s murder, the accused gangsters executed five other men, including two innocent bystanders, gas furnace repairmen Ed Schellenberg, 55, and Christopher Mohan, who lived in a suite next to Lal’s in the Surrey high-rise.

The subsequent police investigation nearly went off the rails. In the course of chasing suspects, one RCMP officer allegedly had an affair with another Red Scorpion moll, not K.M.. According to unconfirmed reports, the Mountie impregnated her.

The same officer and three other RCMP investigators were then charged with 20 criminal counts, including fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice; most are related to allegedly false overtime and expense claims related to the Surrey Six investigation.

One notorious Vancouver-area gang banger pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder for his role in the massacre. He can no longer be described by his real name, thanks to another court-imposed publication ban.

Last week, former Red Scorpion kingpin Michael Le cut a deal with the Crown and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. Le is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 17; it’s expected the murder charge he still faces will be stayed.

Media may not describe events in court that led to Le’s plea bargain, nor publish any photograph or likeness of him, the results of yet another court-ordered publication ban. As if that weren’t enough secrecy, reasons for the latest publication bans can’t be published, either.

There were once five accused of first degree-murder. Now there are three. Jamie Bacon — the youngest of the notorious Bacon brother trio — is to be tried separately at a later date, on a single first-degree charge and on conspiracy to commit murder. A sixth man is charged with manslaughter for his alleged role in the Surrey Six murders; he is also to be tried later.

For now, it’s just Mr. Haevischer and Mr. Johnston, seated side by side in the prisoner’s dock, protected by thick bulletproof glass inside Vancouver’s high-security basement dungeon, Courtroom 20.

K.M. sat across from them this week, in the witness box.

She may help put two alleged killers away, but she’s hardly a sympathetic figure. K.M. speaks of her Red Scorpion days with gusto. “We got shit done,” she told Crown counsel Geoffrey Baragar earlier this week. “People didn’t really want to mess with us. We were kind of taking over and making money.”

She was a disinterested high school student when she started buying drugs from Mr. Haevischer, she testified. Marijuana, ecstasy, magic mushrooms. He got her into dealing crack cocaine, she said under cross-examination on Friday.

K.M. proved to be fearless, driving alleged dealers such as Mr. Haevischer to appointments and drop-offs, joking about their criminal enterprises. She was willing to go further than other “girls,” she testified, and was soon running dial-a-dope operations — established “drug lines” — around Metro Vancouver.

Surrey was especially lucrative, she testified Friday. “Surrey is so busy and has so many crackheads, you could have five or six lines and still be making money,” K.M. told defence counsel Simon Buck.

New product was “tested on the street.” If customers liked it, the Red Scorpions procured more. Deadbeats and rival dealers weren’t tolerated. K.M was herself involved in altercations; one on occasion, she said, threw a chair at a car. She recalls carrying a knife around with her. She helped get “shit done.”

Then the day came — Oct. 19, 2007 — when the Red Scorpions decided to get even with unwitting Corey Lal, it is alleged. K.M. described in court how several of the accused Surrey Six killers returned from an excursion in a state of excitement, and ordered her to clean bullets from a handgun they produced and placed on a table. She says she used Windex. Then she boiled a handful of cellphones she’d been handed. “It was prettying f***ing tense in there,” she testified.

No shame, no self-recrimination. She only broke down when recalling her break-up with Mr. Haevischer, after the Surrey Six massacre. Even now she feels uneasy, she testified, ratting out her former “brothers.”